Collection: LEAH AEGERTER - ONCE A RIVER | August 22 - September 22, 2023

BIO

Leah Aegerter is an artist working in object- based sculpture and installation. She lives and works in Carbondale, CO, and spends much of her free time exploring the mountains and deserts of the American West on foot and raft. Using a combination of digital fabrication techniques and traditional processes in materials such as wood, paper, and steel, she crafts objects that investigate her physical and emotional relationships to the landscapes she inhabits.

Leah received a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. In 2022 she was named an Aspen Art Museum Artist Fellow. She has participated in residencies at Grand Canyon National Park, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Rockland Woods, and others.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My sculptures are abstract portraits of moments I capture and experience in the landscape. I am attracted to rocks as genderless entities whose transformative nature codes them with life, and I explore what it means to be physically and emotionally intimate with them. As I travel through the natural world, I document my surroundings through 3D scanning, and then use digital fabrication techniques to reproduce the geological surfaces in new materials. In doing so, I aim to honor the history of the original form as well as the digital transformation as I catalog the moments my body and being meld with the world.

Rocks hold billions of years of history: history of water coursing through the landscape and eroding geological surfaces into unique textures; history of flora and fauna inhabiting vastly different landscapes than we see today; history of prolonged tectonic collision and fracture. My sculptures help me confront what it means to be a human in this current landscape, this current moment of geological history. They are physical manifestations of observed textures, feelings, and occurrences in the natural world.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

The Colorado was once a river of immense power whose waters ground and polished the landscapes of the past to carve the canyons of today. Once a river free of constraints but now shackled by infrastructure that parcels out a dwindling supply of water to the growing population of the Western states, the Colorado holds histories that are almost unfathomable to my human- centric understanding of the planet.

Once a River is an exhibition full of reverence for what these waters have created, but also of longing for the lost landscapes of the Colorado River Basin. Imagine what the river could reveal within canyon walls had its seasonal forces persevered. This body of work galvanizes a complexity of emotion into hope as I take inspiration from the geology of the present to imagine the geology of the future. In my vision of the future, we strike a harmony between nature-made and human- made structure; the hand and the land come together in support rather than opposition.

The title Once a River also alludes to the geological changes in landscape over the course of Earth’s history. The Southwest has been sand dunes, sea floor, marshland, and so on until the continuous shifting and compaction of sediment evolved into the current landscape. As we bear witness to the desertification of the West, I remind myself that in another hundred million years it will have shifted once again, whether that change is wrought by humans or by Mother Earth.

Building a tactile relationship to the rocks, dirt, and flora is my act of honoring this moment in time. floor, marshland, and so on until the continuous shifting and compaction of sediment evolved into the current landscape. As we bear witness to the desertification of the West, I remind myself that in another hundred million years it will have shifted once again, whether that change is wrought by humans or by Mother Earth. Building a tactile relationship to the rocks, dirt, and flora is my act of honoring this moment in time.

“I invite viewers to surrender to my fantastical utopia upon entering the threshold of the gallery. In this future, flowers still bloom, the sun and moon still rise and fall, and the structures of society evolve into spaces of contemplation. Twenty-four hours is as precious a time scale as 240 million years, and the societal shift to deep-time thinking encourages attunement to the micro-moments of both infrastructure and nature.”